RIM is Staying in the Consumer Market

Rumors were abound that in order to adapt and grow, RIM would be abandoning the mobile consumer space and would instead focus on what’s always been its strongest audience, the enterprise and professional market.

The rumors were sparked by Hein’s original comments in which he stated that RIM was refocusing on the enterprise market. The press and media took this statement out of context, and began speculation that RIM would no longer produce consumer related products.

“Many said that RIM will leave the consumer business- that is absolutely not true, that is not what I said.”

Heins clarified further that by his original statement, he only meant that RIM needed to stop designing as many services in-house and that they should instead try and achieve their consumer-based goals through external partnerships.

“We spend a lot of time on who are we mostly talking to, who is the target customer. The common denominator with all our customers is that they are striving to succeed.”

Heins went on to strengthen the idea of “success” which he first talked about yesterday morning during his presentation at the general session (keynote). RIM has refocused its goals to target productive Blackberry users who strive to be successful.

“When I talk about people that want to be successful that is not in any way exclusive. The design objective of Blackberry products is to help people succeed.”

Throughout the conference RIM continuously referred to it’s consumer base as “Blackberry people,” and identified them as all people who wish to succeed. It’s evident that RIM also plans to succeed. There is no reason why this new focus and “success” plan shouldn’t prevail, so long as RIM sticks to their guns.